Are you talking to me?: A Life Through the Movies. John Walsh
me, I stood looking at the gigantic plaque of light, transfixed, turned to stone by my first encounter with the big screen, oblivious to my co-scholars and the rest of the audience, gazing at the bright cloudless day in front of me, feeling a strange longing to get up on-stage and walk straight into it.
‘Sit down, will you?’ asked a stroppy voice from behind.
Beside me, Armfield yanked the sleeve of my school blazer. I subsided, and sat on a surface approximately one foot wide. It was amazingly uncomfortable. How, I thought, can I sit on this for three hours? Without undue fuss, Armfield reached behind my back and pushed, so that I flew forward as my first-ever tip-up seat subsided beneath me with a bump.
It had a strong spring, this seat. It was far from certain that my puny weight would keep the thing down under me. Could it, I wondered, tip right back up again, folding me in half and leaving me helplessly mewling with only my legs and school socks showing? This was a whole new territory of alarm – the total darkness, the usherette’s stabbing light, the fearsome jaws of the seat I was perched on, the huge, brightly-lit, wall-sized rectangle I’d never encountered before – that screen that drew your eye, whatever was on it, and made you forget everything else. It was fantastically exciting, all of it, better than any funfair ride. Best of all it was in colour, whereas our tiny Rediffusion TV back home showed things only in monochrome greys. I felt simultaneously lost, elated and completely at home with the enormous new world unfolding in front of me.
The words ‘Preview of Forthcoming Attractions’ appeared on the screen. They meant nothing to me, but I watched like an urchin with his nose pressed against a sweet-shop window as the faces of Leslie Caron and Tom Bell appeared – emoting, argumentative, flushed, agonised, rapturous – in a series of bleak domestic scenes and dismal black-and-white views of London parks. It was the first trailer I’d ever seen (advertising The L-Shaped Room), and although the story looked fantastically depressing, the voice-over dramatically promised that it was shocking and challenging and ‘a film for today’, so that you felt duty-bound to see it as soon as possible, despite being eight years too young (it carried an X certificate) to do any such thing.
The preview ended. Two mile-high curtains swished shut. The lights came on. Was that the end? Had we come to the wrong cinema? I could see the bright auditorium at last, and looked around. We sat, all fourteen of us plus two teachers, line-abreast across a whole row, chattering and gazing at the Odeon’s mile-high ceiling, the complicated sculptures on the facing walls, the great proscenium arch. I wondered if people – real people – came out and acted on this massive stage in front of the film while it was showing. If not, it seemed a shocking waste of the dramatic expanse before us – it was a sort of epic altar, far bigger than the stage on which I’d witnessed Puss in Boots at the Wimbledon Theatre’s panto season the previous Christmas.
Then the lights went out again, and the great curtains swished back to reveal a snarling lion. The unseen speakers took the snarl and fed it through some abysmal sonic filter so that it reverberated until the sound went down underneath where you were sitting, and made your seat vibrate. A pause, and the lion slothfully disgorged a second, basso profundo growl that was like the post-lunchtime belch with which my friend Grzedzicki could thrill his classmates, but magnified 4,000 times.
Then the title came on screen and remained there for ages, while an overture of orchestral savagery thundered behind it. Kettledrums bonged, cellos sawed like neighing horses, violins ran about shrieking ‘ding-didaling-didaling’, brass trumpets went ‘dum-da-dah!’ and, in an abrupt mood-swing, breathy woodwinds came quietly into the mix, conjuring up a moody Tahitian sunset before we were returned to rolling waves of splashy brass and chaotic surges of strings. It was tremendously exciting.
The film began. A botanical expert from Kew was strolling along the quay at Portsmouth in a tricorn hat, with a cylinder under his arm and what seemed a pitifully small sack of clothing for a long sea voyage. (My mother would never have let me bundle up my shirts and trousers in a horrible sack like that.) He encountered a gaggle of sailors, some with elaborate beards, some with rolling eyes, all destined for the HMS Bounty. They laughingly upbraided him for calling a ship a ‘boat’ and talked in unfriendly, joshing tones about the ordeal that lay ahead. The man from Kew Gardens was earnest and slightly lost, a nice guy fallen among rough, know-it-all companions. As he signed on for the voyage, leaning on a slanting desk, something about the opening scenes began to strike a chord – but I didn’t yet know what it was. The rough-diamond sailors pulled the cylinder from under his armpit.
‘Careful with that,’ he said. ‘Those are scientific documents.’
But they were merely pictures of breadfruit, which he laid out on a convenient barrel and used as part of a lecture about West Indian eating habits, not unlike the lesson we’d endured two hours earlier.
We’d been right. This was going to be an educational bore after all. Then Captain Bligh, played by Trevor Howard, appeared. He had a lined, rather cruel face and small piggy eyes, and something about his old-maidish mouth suggested he was always chewing something nasty without ever spitting it out. Dressed in white stockings, a dark blue uniform and a Duke of Wellington hat, he cut a comical but faintly sinister figure. He instantly reminded me of Mr King the sports master, whose appearance on the rugby pitch in his navy blue tracksuit was always the prelude to random acts of violence.
Fletcher Christian wafted on board. I had heard about Marlon Brando, the American actor with the cissy name. He was a real hero, my friends said, a brilliant actor, an exotic figure who probably lived in New York and knew other famous actors, and went round to the houses of famous people all the time and, you know, had lunch with them. It was important that he was American because we were in love with American things – the cars with the sharky fins, the Western guns, the tough-guy fist-fights, the space suits, the fact that, according to 77 Sunset Strip, American policemen chewed gum all the time and actually got to shoot people. Most of all we liked their accents, and sometimes tried to imitate them. They sounded like English accents on a slide, a drawling, don’t-care voice, far more appealing than the stuck-up, sit-up-and-beg accents of British people who read the news and appeared in quiz shows.
But was this really Brando, the famous actor-hero of whom I’d heard so much from my clued-up, movie-going friends? He wore a light-blue fancy-dress outfit, a comical hat and a red cloak like Superman’s, and my first reaction was of distaste: he seemed a bit of a garçon de Nancy as we called cissy actors on television. His hair was pulled back off his forehead and worn in a greasy ponytail, and his face was pulled back with it, so that his eyes were oddly slitty and Chinese – and he talked in a weird, affected, fastidious neigh of British distaste, as if he could hardy bear to say anything at all through his clenched teeth. He seemed about as heroic as the adjustable mannequin that posed in the window of Arding & Hobbs. He came aboard flanked by two ladies of fashion, one English, one French, who flapped and dimpled like flamingoes among the creaking sheets and elderly timbers of the merchantman, until they were shooed ashore by the captain.
He and Captain Bligh were soon having a row about why Brando had bothered going into the Navy.
‘The Army didn’t seem quite right,’ he told the captain, ‘and affairs of state are rather a bore …’
Ratha a bawww …
Captain Bligh pursed his skinny mouth with distaste. Well, I thought, this is going to be fun: one nasty, face-chewing man in long white socks, and one Chinky-faced, oily-haired clot with a foolish accent and a cloak, who was happier with silly women in ringlets and picture hats than with daggers and swords and stuff.
But once Mr Fryer, the dependable first mate, said, ‘Set topsails and headsails,’ we were away on a voyage and I was happily away too. There was an unstoppable swing to the voyage, and the narrative on which we’d embarked, a feeling of being swept up in it all as if you’d been press-ganged aboard and you wouldn’t be able to get off, even if you wanted to. It was like being on a ride at Battersea funfair – a place I haunted for weeks every summer – when you’d ridden the long train to the top of the Water Splash and were turning into the long slide down to where the water lurked, and there was nothing you could do but sit there amid a lot of screaming strangers, and scream